Holocaust Memorial Day

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) for bringing the debate to the House. I also thank hon. Members for their contributions so far today. As we have heard, the theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is the power of words, and it is important to remember the context in which Nazism arose after the treaty of Versailles and the 1929 crash. A murderous regime was able to take hold of Germany during terrible economic conditions, and it then drove its ideology through Europe and tried to undertake the genocide of my people—the Jewish people.

Last autumn, I met Martin Kapel, who lives in Headingley in my constituency, at a Woodcraft Folk event. He was talking to boys and girls who were the same age as him when he was expelled from Germany by the Nazis. My boys, who are also Woodcraft Folkers, were the age he was when he was taken from his family. The realisation hit me hard when I saw my own boys with Martin and I had to think of him enduring the grim reality of the loss of his family.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that holocaust survivors such as Solly Irving are remembered, with their stories living on after they pass, so that we do not repeat the mistakes that have been made and instead create a better world for everyone?

[Alex Sobel]

That is one of the most important lessons of Holocaust Memorial Day and of our memories of the holocaust.

Many people’s only real insight into what the camps or the ghettos were like is through film. I have watched many of these films, including “Jakob the Liar”, “Schindler’s List” and “Sophie’s Choice”, but the most poignant for me is “Life Is Beautiful”, directed by the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni. The first half of the film is a romantic comedy about how Benigni’s character, a Jewish bookkeeper, falls in love with and marries an Italian woman in the 1930s. They then have a son, and Benigni’s character and his son get sent to a concentration camp. To protect his son, he pretends that the camp is a game and that the prize is winning a tank. I am unsure whether my children are quite ready to watch the film, but I would use it to introduce to them what the horror of the holocaust means, because it is the most human and poignant telling of the holocaust that I have seen.

The holocaust has deeply affected my family. My parents were born in 1946, and I remember sitting in my great-aunt’s kitchen in Tel Aviv as a young child, seeing the numbers tattooed on her arm and asking my father, “Why?” She was in the camps. She did not have her own children or grandchildren. I had no aunts or uncles or cousins to play with, because the Nazis experimented on her and she could not have children. This hollow shell cast a dark spectre over my family—all the relatives I never met or who never survived, and the children they never had.

That is my living memory of what happened, and it is seared into me when I make my own political judgments or when I make decisions about the genocide happening now to the Rohingya or the Yazidis, or elsewhere around the world. It also happens when I think about decisions more locally. We sit in a place of tolerance and pluralism. We call those on the other side of the House “hon. Members”, and they are our opponents, not our enemies. We should be grateful for our democracy and for how this place operates. We need that same political culture everywhere: in our parties, on the streets, in our schools, and in our workplaces.

Every day, I try to work with that memory of my family and the dark spectre of the holocaust. I try to take that into all my experiences and all my dealings with people. I try to be tolerant towards them, but when intolerance comes and they have a message of hate, I try to face it down and stand up to it by saying, “I do not accept what you have to say. You are wrong.” I first try to educate, but then I try to use the power of the state and the power we have to ensure that those people do not come forward. We sit beneath the plaque to Jo Cox and remember that she was struck down by these same people on the far right. It is our duty here in this place, and the duty of everyone in this country, to stand up for tolerance and pluralism and to act against intolerance and extremism.